Site News: Time to get ‘the show’ on the road again…

Well fellow book fans it’s great to be back in the reading seat again, and I really must apologise with every bone in my body (if bones can actually apologise that is), for my recent bout of inconsistency around the place.

November ended up being a heck of a month for me health-wise, and it took me way longer to recover than I thought it would have. And December was nothing more than a start-and-stop affair as I kept kidding myself that I was ready to return to some serious blogging. It was a frustrating time for me, and nobody was more disappointed when I failed to follow through on a small number (thankfully) of pre-arranged reading commitments. So to those who were affected by the promises that I failed to deliver on, and to those RobAround readers who’ve lost some faith in me during the past few weeks – I’m truly sorry.

The good news though is that all is well with me again. I’m fired up and raring to go, and ready to make amends for my recent slow down. I’ve learned a lot over the past few weeks – the main thing being that one cannot ride on the crest of an illness as well as one could in one’s 30s – and as a result I’ve put a number of ‘mechanisms’ in place to ensure that I don’t slip off the tracks again – at least, so easily – regardless of what fate may throw at me (nothing else too severe I hope).

Staying on track is a future thing though, because if my ambitions of striding forward into 2010 with RobAroundBooks are to be realised, then I’ve got to get back on the track in the first place. So the first thing I’m going to do – aside from keeping the content ticking over in relation to newly released publications that are of interest to me (VERY important) – is to get myself back on board with the reading that was ongoing at the time I started to slip. In other words I’m going to play catch up.

So ‘catching up’ means getting rid of the four books that have languished in my ‘Read But Not Yet Reviewed’ box in the sidebar for far longer than must be considered acceptable. Three out of four of these books you see there are exemplary reads (as I’m sure many of you will already know), and it breaks my heart to think that I myself have yet to give them the shining praise that they so deserve. In a similar vein, now may also be a good time to reassure anyone whose books I’ve committed to reading, but haven’t yet done so. My Book Review Pledge states that ‘any book that I have agreed to review will be reviewed’. I absolutely stand by this, as I do with everything I pledge on that page. So please be assured. If I’ve said yes to reading your book then I mean yes, and I will continue to do so.

‘Catching up’ also means regaining a hold on my most ambitious reading challenge that never was (or barely was) during the latter half of 2009 – my Totally Knut reading challenge. This was surely the most organised personal reading challenge I’ve created to date – and at the most timely juncture i.e. the 150th anniversary year of the birth of Knut Hamsun – but as organised as the Totally Knut challenge was, the energy I needed for it just wasn’t there. I’m just finishing off the revised reading plan for Totally Knut, which will run in exactly the same reading order but in a new Spring-flavoured time slot. The only thing I can’t do any more unfortunately, is to pay Hamsun the proper tribute he deserves and complete the challenge during his anniversary year. That truly breaks my heart, but what can I do?

‘Catching up’ also means regaining a hold on the ‘lesser’ ongoing reading challenges I found myself snagged up with during the latter half of the year. None of these were set to a particular deadline, so technically I haven’t failed in them, but progress has ground to a halt, meaning they will remain in a perpetual state of ‘unfinishedness’, if left unchecked. There’s my iPoe reading challenge, where I read all 73 of Edgar Allan Poe’s published stories; my Checkin’ Off the Chekhov Shorts reading challenge in which I read the 201 Chekhov shorts found on James Rusk’s excellent online repository of Chekhov stories, and a good number of ‘newly-discovered’ Chekhov stories. There’s also Devouring De Maupassant (note: the table needs to be fixed on the hub page), a reading challenge very close to my heart, where I work my way through the sprawling bibliography of the French story-writing maestro. Let’s also not forget one the latest reading challenges I began – The Trevor vs. Moore Chekhov Challenge, where I’m reading The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore (Faber) and The Collected Stories of William Trevor (Penguin), and then deciding from a short list of ten from each, which author is the more Chekhovian (my launch post for the challenge explains the rationale behind it all).

‘Catching up’ also means bringing back into active service all of the more general features that made RobAroundBooks what it was; features which RobAroundBooks a little different from the norm. I’ve more or less managed to keep my Bookshelf of the Week, 100 Shots of Short, and my Book Bites ticking over for the most part. But old favourites (to me and hopefully to you), such as Rob’s Reader of the Week, On the Radar and Cover Love have fallen by the wayside; as have newer features such as Behind the Pen. Also guys, let’s see if I can’t get the posting frequency for my Daily Bookshot back to what it was originally intended to be i.e. DAILY .

So there’s a heck of a lot of ‘catching up’ to be done around here folks (and I’m not even factoring in all of the still-to-be-introduced stuff that’s been on the back burner for a while now). But I’m adamant that I want to get RobAroundBooks, and myself, back to the level of reading passion and activity that existed before. In the eighteen short months that RobAroundBooks has been bouncing around the blogosphere, I’ve never been more fulfilled in my reading, and never so exhilarated. And while some of that is down to the reading material itself, most of it is down to you guys. You motivate me. You fuel me. And you educate me. So the very least I can do is to give a little of that back. The best way I know of doing that is to ensure that I continue to maintain a portal that’s as energetic about reading as the wonderful readers who visit it.

I sense exciting reading times ahead my dear friends, and I hope we can enjoy them together. So here’s to an uber-bookish 2010, and here’s to showing the world in some small way just how much reading matters!